It's not necessarily new for an interviewer to throw in a curveball to keep a candidate on their toes. It happened to me: While applying for college I was asked what sort of light fixture I would be.
But it's become a new norm in Silicon Valley to have nontraditional paths toward hopeful employment: Weird questions, special tests, the whole nine yards. Someone in 2015 was interviewing for a job at Airbnb and was supposedly asked, "What would you do if you were the one survivor in a plane crash?"
